Dynamic voltage and/or frequency scaling has been widely proposed to adapt the power consumption of processors to the minimum required level necessary to achieve a required performance. This is in particular important in mobile devices, such as in mobile phones, laptops and pda's, operating on battery power. The performance delivered by such mobile devices not only depends on the performance of the processors used therein, e.g. digital signal processors, general purpose processors etc, but also on the performance of data-handling facilities used by such processors, such as memories and communication networks. Important performance parameters for such data-handling facilities are a bandwidth, i.e. a number of data-units handled per time-unit and a latency, the delay between the request for a handling of data and the time within which the request is performed. In the sequel, a request will also be denoted as command, and all events required to complete a single command will also be denoted as transaction.
Worm et al., “An Adaptive Low-power Transmission Scheme for On-chip Networks”, ISSS'02, Oct. 2-4, 2002, Kyoto, Japan, describe a point-to-point unidirectional on-chip interconnect. Data is transmitted in encoded form via this interconnect and decoded by a receiver. If transmitted encoded data has an irrecoverable error, a retransmission takes place. The retransmissions of transmitted encoded data are repeated until the decoding by the receiver is successful. In this interconnect, the error rate is controlled by the swing voltage with which the transmitter drives the interconnect. A higher swing voltage results in a lower error rate. As a consequence the average number of retransmissions is reduced and therewith the average bandwidth is increased.
The cited article merely provides a solution to regulate power consumption in a network of a system comprising point-to-point links.